Big Machine (47 page)

The buzzing got louder and louder until I expected the room’s window to crack apart.

The machine worked too well. It was pulverizing my bones and my delusions. My teeth hurt, so I held my face.

And then it was done.

The machine turned off, and Gayle was led to a room for rest. I sat on the blue Arlington sofa again. New couples were in the waiting room. When Gayle was ready, I took her home.

We’d picked out two names for the baby, one for a girl and one for a boy. When I repeated those names to myself in Murder’s basement, I felt like I was making introductions to that unborn child. Moving toward it. Near enough that it could hear me. That’s when I finally cried.

I felt my whole body for the first time in days. Real awareness through every limb, all the accumulated pain. I had a chill deep inside me. The tears burned my dry eyes, and I blinked furiously, afraid my eyes would crack in their sockets.

Eight years earlier I’d had so many ideas why fatherhood was impossible: Gayle and I fought worse than Arabs and Jews. Worse than Arabs and Arabs. Even working full-time I had trouble covering rent. And of course there was the dope. How you going to bring a child into all that?
It’s shortsighted. Selfish. A mistake. And while all those might be good reasons for caution, they weren’t mine. Not really. Plenty of others had managed to raise a kid through the same, or much worse. The shame I felt wasn’t because
of what
Gayle did, but
why
I got her to do it.

I was a coward.

I muttered apologies to Gayle, and to our child, for the first time in my life. Nothing specific, just that pathetic old refrain.

“I’m sorry,” I whispered.

My father always used to say that to me when I asked about our lunch date in 1968.

“I’m so sorry,” I said again.

The sight must’ve been high tragedy, that’s what I thought. A fucking junky, dying on his ass, starving, face like a corpse, apologizing to a baby that hadn’t even been born and a woman he no longer knew. Absolutely wretched. Imagine the portrait.

And there I caught myself.

I
was
imagining the picture, and it was absolutely romantic. Romantic like the boy who fantasizes dying on a field of war, killing a thousand enemies before being cut down. Romantic as the girl who envisions poisoning herself, leaving a corpse that’ll indict the one who finds it, a plucked and corrupted rose. A man, coming to an end like mine, should perish in this pose: contrite, abject, mythic.

Is this really all I am? I wondered. A grown man acting no better than a
teenager?

The image I’d always held of myself was so much more forgiving.

All this occurred to me as my soul was sucked farther down into my body by those feline mouths below. I watched as I slipped out from the comfortable space of my skull and down inside the tight, moist channel of my throat.

This is really happening, I thought. This is really happening!

When the bobtails finished chewing me up, there wasn’t just death waiting at the end. More like a reckoning. The ancient Egyptians believed the god Anubis met each of us on the other side, and that he stood before a great scale on which our hearts were set. There each was weighed, tested, for its worth.

Every time I’d blasted my dad with the story of how he’d returned me to the orphanage, he’d gone into a real depression, and I’d thought, in a child’s satisfied way, that he
should
feel pain. But in Murder’s basement I realized I’d been wrong. Leaving me behind wasn’t what had made my father feel guilty. Not just that anyway. He’d felt guilty because leaving me behind had been so
easy
.

When I sat on that blue Arlington sofa and stared at my hands, while Gayle groaned with genuine heartache, I only impersonated sorrow. I
wasn’t devastated when the old woman called us into the back. Not despondent when Gayle and I left quietly after, not touching.

I was relieved.

Was this the heart I wanted measured?

And right then, the cats stopped eating. Not when I thought about what my father had done to me, or even when I admitted what I’d done to Gayle, but when I asked myself if I was satisfied with the life I’d led. With the man I’d turned out to be. Then the cats paused. For a moment they weren’t pulling me down.

And in that respite I willed my soul to climb. And though my arm, up there, out there, still wasn’t moving, I scrambled back up my own throat. I returned my eyes to my face. My spirit moved with such gusto that my body sprang up at the waist and I sat upright on the unfinished basement floor. From this position I could see one of the exits the feral cats used, an empty window frame taped half-shut with cardboard. I hadn’t been able to see it while on my back. Early evening outside, but still enough sunlight to see the foundation of the next home only yards away.

Can people change? I thought.

I wasn’t addressing myself. Maybe the cats? Or whatever had created them.

I fell over on my left side and grabbed at the ground underneath the hard layers of cold clothes. With a grip in the earth I pulled myself toward the open window frame, finding handholds in the dirt the way a free climber scales a mountain. Carefully. Slowly.

I know I’ve been selfish. But there’s still some good in me.

I can stop being a coward. I can be brave.

I promise.

When I looked backward, over my right shoulder, the cats rested on their haunches and watched me. They tilted their heads in unison, smacked their lips simultaneously. Blood on their whiskers and paws.

I was feeble, but determined, and sometimes that’s all you need. My right leg, below the knee, remained cold, felt empty. I wouldn’t even have known it was there if the weight hadn’t dragged at my knee.

When I pulled myself out through the empty window frame, I lay on my back in the last warmth of the setting sun. I looked at Murder’s home. There were figures moving behind the gold curtains on the first floor. They gestured wildly. I heard grunts and laughter.

They had a perfect system worked out. I understood it now. The bobtails devour the soul and then Murder eats the body. Once they were done, there’d be no evidence you ever existed, not on the physical or spiritual plane. This is how some folks go out. We don’t die, we’re erased.

I expected the veil to part, for Murder’s red face to press against the
pane, for him to catch me trying to get away. Instead of waiting to be yanked back in, I turned onto my stomach and dragged myself until I found a puddle of rainwater at the bottom of the next house’s gutter spout. It was filled with fallen leaves and three dead gypsy moths. I drank until it was dry.

The cats came to the basement window, but stayed inside the frame. They watched me while I lay outside, lapping. Another puddle of rainwater lay a few feet closer to the street, and I crawled to that one, drank from it too. The cats stayed perched in the window frame, stomachs only partly full.

How much of my spirit did they get? I can’t really say. Who can put exact figures on such a thing? But if I had to guess, I’d bet they gobbled up nearly half of me. That part remains there still, waiting in the belly of the underworld. Someday I would have to reckon with it, but for now I was alive. Left with, let’s say, 60 percent of my essence. Not enough soul to be careless with but, if I changed, maybe enough to eventually tip that great scale.

“I CAN’T GO BACK
to Vermont if we get through this,” I said.

“Oh, Ricky, please.”

This declaration, the decision, must’ve seemed to bubble up from nowhere, so I understood Adele’s exasperation. But questioning her at the gates of the Washburn estate had left me contemplative. I’d been replaying moments of my life in my head as we marched. Like my escape from Murder’s basement in 2002. And the promise I’d made in Cedar Rapids.
I can be brave
.

“I thought I joined the Library to finally prove myself. I thought I was being bold. But maybe it turned out to be just another place to hide.”

The San Francisco Bay lay to our left, nothing between us and the sea but fifteen feet. The quiet gray water shined in the sunlight. I looked behind us, and the view was dominated by the sky, not the land. This didn’t make our problems down below seem small, exactly, but simply ours. The Heavens were busy casting beauty.

“So you just quit and do what? Go back to the minimum wage?”

I smiled. “I’m not romanticizing that, believe me.”

We’d gone about as far as we could on foot. The Port of Garland was the shipping hub of the city, so most of it was docks and shipping containers. All of which were protected by chain-link fence rising two stories high. Stitch Bridge loomed nearby, well over our heads, but I didn’t see how we could reach it.

“Why’d they bring us this way?” I asked. “We can’t get up to the bridge from here.”

“Maybe they brought us out here to just kill us,” Adele said.

“You really believe that?”

“No,” she said. “I guess I don’t. But what else? Tell me what good we’re supposed to do from here.”

“You act like I’ve got the answer,” I said.

She looked up at me. “You sure you don’t have any?”

I felt the life inside me as a steady, low vibration by this point. At times it seemed to buck, to move. To kick. For the first time I thought of it not just as a life but as a child.

My child.

Just ahead of us the two Swamp Angels changed direction, veering left, entering a small park that we reached a minute later.

Port View Park had a circular driveway that led to a small playground. There was a snack bar and bait shop on the same lot. And between them a long concrete pathway leading right out to the lip of the Bay.

“You see that?” I whispered.

At the end of the path, in that distance, three silhouettes. Three.

THE WATERS
of the San Francisco Bay smashed against the stone shoreline. Breezes off the water so strong now that Adele and I got bopped around. As we got closer to the end, I saw an octagonal fishing pier. The thing looked so old, just a mess of warped wood. Room enough for fifteen fishermen to cast lines off the sides. A sign posted at the pier’s entrance read:
FIRE DANGER. NO OPEN FLAMES. NO BARBECUES. NO FIRES
.

The three figures standing on it solidified as we approached. The Swamp Angels were perched on the top rung of the pier’s railing, looking down. On the pier floor stood Solomon Clay. He raised his arms and waved toward Stitch Bridge. He didn’t seem to notice the Swamp Angels. Maybe he couldn’t see them. Maybe he never had.

“You’ve hurt a lot of people!” I shouted.

Solomon Clay dropped his hands, looked at Adele and me.

“I’ll hurt a lot more before I’m through!” he answered back.

We had to yell to be heard over the noisy shoreline. I already had the gun out of my pocket, but I didn’t know if I could hit him from that far. I had to get closer. If I’d been better rested, I would’ve run, but Adele and I were only being held together by the stitching in our clothes at this point. The best we could manage was a trot.

Solomon wore a sharp gabardine raincoat, buttoned up and tied off, which made it look like a monk’s robe. The boards of the pier were dark with moisture. Soaked with that explosive formula.

“We’ve seen what that stuff can do,” Adele shouted.

Solomon looked down at the pier.

Solomon climbed onto the first rung of the pier’s railing, and his weight caused the wood to whimper. These planks were as brittle as tinder sticks. He said, “I’m only waiting to see if my flock is in position.”

He had no fear of us. I was almost there. My boots beat on the concrete.

Solomon thumped the top rung of the pier with his fist. “That’s their sign.”

Adele and I followed his line of sight. From the overcrowded upper roadway of Stitch Bridge I saw a series of business jackets flitting through the air. Must’ve been thirty or forty of them, maybe even more. The Church of Clay had dressed for work today, just like anyone else. Their cheap coats floated from the bridge, the flags of a woeful country.

“Time for mine,” he said.

I found the energy to run faster with the gun stiff-armed in front of me. But I still wasn’t quite there. Twenty feet might as well be a hundred if you’re not accurate. Solomon Clay undid his raincoat. The suit underneath looked baggy, sagging on his frame because it had been doused. Soaked. He removed a lighter from his pants pocket. Did I see his hands shaking? I wouldn’t reach him with a bullet. I thought maybe I should try something else.

“I’m pregnant!” I shouted.

I would’ve expected him to laugh, most anyone else would have. Even in the midst of all this strangeness, what I said had to be the strangest of all. Adele’s reaction was closer to expected. She fell. Tripped and rolled right into the fence running along one side of the concrete pathway. As if my words had come right out and swept her leg.

Mr. Clay? He didn’t drop that lighter, but his thumb froze on the striker wheel. He looked away from the bridge, into my face.

“You’re …”

And, that quick, he knew it was true. He
knew
. The lighter fell from his hand, clunked on the pier floor. I was close enough now. I raised the gun. I pressed the muzzle to his forehead.

Solomon said, “Not yet.”

SOLOMON MOVED JUST HIS EYES
, looking up at the barrel of the gun still pressed to his head.

“When would be better?” I asked sarcastically, as if we were planning a lunch. But really, I wanted to be talked out of shooting him. I didn’t want to kill anyone.

“First let me understand.”

I looked at my hand, the pistol, as if they weren’t even mine. It took me a moment to remember I had control over them. Then I lowered my hand, but I kept the gun out. Behind me I heard the rattle of the chain-link fence as Adele grabbed on to it and pulled herself to her feet.

Solomon squinted at me now, and behind him the Swamp Angels remained perched on the top rung of the pier. Their bodies swayed with the breezes coming off the Bay. Had they brought Adele and me here to kill Mr. Clay or to hear him out?